BREAKING NEWS: Design

This Little Cottage Maximises Space With A Clever Renovation

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 19:00:10 +0000

This Little Cottage Maximises Space With A Clever Renovation

Architecture

by Christina Karras

Treeview Cottage by Tsai Design is a renovated Victorian cottage.

HC28 Cosmo Bufa Sofa from DOMO.

The living room features an elevated ceiling, making room for a wall of two-storey windows.

A custom daybed and built-in seating maximise space in the dining area.

The playful kitchen combines purples on the island storage, pink for the steelworks, green for the benchtop and splashback, and different shades of blues for the pendant lights.

All the joinery is made from birch plywood.

The kitchen is now the hub of the home, where the family can gather around the recycled blackbutt timber bench.

During demolition, the team discovered an original fireplace in the master bedroom (concealed behind plasterboard) that was incorporated into the redesign.

The rear extension’s metal shed-like exterior was replaced to accommodate the new ceiling height.

The expanded bedroom features a study nook.

Tsai Design’s modus operandi has always focused on unlocking the untapped potential of compact places.

The design firm’s mantra is: ‘Where you see awkward and unconventional, we see opportunity and potential.’

This also happens to be a fair description of their recently completed cottage renovation in Richmond before its transformation.

‘The house was an amalgamation of three different builds over the years,’ Tsai Design director and architect Jack Chen says. ‘On the front, it had the Victorian single-storey brick cottage, there’s a middle extension that was added, and lastly, a metal shed extension to the back.’

Due to the incremental expansion, the resulting house ended up with the rooms all stacked one after another, connected by a very long and narrow corridor. It also meant the spaces inside lacked natural light and the owners — a family who’d lived there for 10 years — had outgrown the existing floorplan.

Jack recalls how they quickly sketched up a concept for the renovation on their very first site visit.

‘It was a drawing showing the tapering up of the ceiling in the open plan living space, welcoming in the northern sunlight and framing the view of a mature tree in the backyard,’ he adds.

This elevated roof line set the tone both for the resulting redesign, and the project’s name: Treeview Cottage.

The front two bedrooms and the main bathroom (which the clients renovated just a few years ago) were retained, allowing them to focus their attention on updated the living spaces and reworking the main bedroom to help ‘break up’ the dominant and dark corridor.

Expanding the bedroom onto the existing deck made room for a study nook, while a new sliding glass door and a skylight in the hallway created an improved sense of indoor-outdoor flow.

The room now almost appears to ‘merge into the corridor’, emphasised by the ceiling beams that stretch the length of the bedroom and continue across the hallway.

At the rear, the kitchen was moved to the dining and living room in order to maximise space. Custom shelving also reveals Tsai Design’s space-saving skills, with pink-steel and plywood shelves connected to a cosy daybed corner, which doubles as seating for the dining table.

‘We tried to work with the existing house rather than demolish and rebuild,’ Jack says. ‘We also preserved and restored the original timber flooring, sanding it back to reveal its natural beauty.’

The footprint of the house is more or less the same. But the simple addition of the raked ceiling, featuring lofty two-storey windows, has been like a breath of fresh air for the family’s much-loved inner city cottage.

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These 2 Kitchen Makeovers Are My All-Time Favorite Paint Transformations

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I Tried the “Rule of 3” Method to Declutter My Closet and Got Rid of 21 Items

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How Farmer’s Fridge took over U.S. airports

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

If you have spent any time traveling in the U.S. over the past 10 years, you may have noticed a curious vending machine filled with jars. Instead of crinkle-cut chips or wired earbuds for that movie you want to watch on the plane, these vending machines sell freshly made apple pecan salads, blueberry chia overnight oats, and mediterranean bowls. They are run by a company called Farmer’s Fridge, and they are slowly taking over airports in the U.S.

Since it launched in 2013, the company has installed its vending machines at about 20 U.S. airports, including LAX, Chicago O’Hare, Dallas Fort-Worth, and most recently, Las Vegas. (I first stumbled on its leafy offerings at JFK airport, while on a quest for a meal that didn’t involve a side of soggy fries.)

And it’s not just airports. These fridges are cropping up everywhere, from hospitals like New York Presbyterian and Boston Medical Center, to Amazon fulfillment centers, college campuses like Northwestern and Harvard, and stadiums like L.A’s Crypto.com Arena. Today, the company counts 1,600 locations around the country, and in the next 10 years, CEO and founder Luke Saunders is hoping to reach 100,000. How? With an understanding of cold chain logistics, an ever-expanding menu, and a swanky new fridge.

This month, the company is debuting a new design that could help the company roll out more fridges at a faster clip. Five years in the works, the new fridge comes with a pitched roof that stands out from its flat-topped competitors. It boasts a new UX where various parts of the machine (from the payment module to the recycling bin where you can return your jar) light up to guide you through your purchase. And perhaps most importantly—at least when it comes to business growth—it is made of two flat-pack modules that can be assembled in just 30 minutes, compared to four hours for the previous model.

For now, the team is rolling these out at new locations only—the first 50 fridges are already on the ground in Chicago and New York. But if these fridges prove as efficient as hoped, the company will begin swapping them out, one airport at a time. “As we look to expand into new markets, our strategy is always to start with the airport,” Saunders told me. “Once we have the airport locked in, we build out the market with other verticals to saturate the market.”

[Photo: Farmer’s Fridge]

The vending machine boom

Lipstick, guacamole, earrings: You can buy pretty much anything out of a vending machine today (especially in Japan.) But in the early 2010s, when Farmer’s Fridge was just a seed in Saunders’s mind, vending machines in the U.S. were only beginning to diversify. Best Buy launched its first airport vending machine in 2008. Sephora launched its in 2009. Benefit followed suit in 2013 with their now-iconic kiosk designed to look like a pink bus.

Saunders’s biggest influence, however, was Redbox, the now-defunct movie rental kiosk company. That, and ATMs, he says with a laugh. “Prior to [ATMs], you had to go into a bank, talk to somebody, wait in line, and now you could go anytime you wanted,” he says. ATMs, like vending machines, were convenient, and they were available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “Why has no one done this for food?” he wondered.

At the time, most vending machines sold snacks with a disturbingly long shelf life. The reasons for that are obvious. When food doesn’t need to be refrigerated, the level of urgency to get it from the facility where it’s made and into people’s mouths is significantly lower than when it’s fresh. A granola bar, for example, can take anywhere from two weeks to six months to make it into a vending machine. A salad from Farmer’s Fridge can only spend 24 to 48 hours in transit. After that, Saunder says, “the fridge won’t let you buy it.”

Farmer’s Food makes every meal in-house, from a 100,000 square-foot facility in Chicago. The workday begins at 4 a.m. with washing and chopping veggies, cooking pasta, and mixing dressings. The assembly line begins at 8 a.m., and by 6 p.m., the company has to decide where these meals will be shipped off to.

The team makes this decision based on a cost-function algorithm that Saunders himself built in the early days to calculate the probability the company will sell an item against the profitability of that item. The algorithm takes into consideration purchasing data, historical foot traffic data, and other variables like the weather.

Today, the software mostly gets it right, but that wasn’t always the case. Ten years ago, Saunders says about 50% of meals were left unsold. Now, that number has dropped to 5%. (Unsold meals get either donated or composted, depending on the location.)

[Photo: Farmer’s Fridge]

From salads to . . . sushi?

From the beginning, Saunders suspected that the biggest hurdle to scaling wouldn’t be a lack of interest, but a lack of infrastructure. To prove out his theory, he set out to find a pilot location and eventually installed his first Farmer’s Fridge in a food court in Chicago. As Saunders recalls it, the food court was desperate for a tenant, and he himself was desperate for a landlord.

The food court ended up shuttering soon after that, but the machine had done its job, and interest snowballed from there. In the first year, the company made about $350,000. This year, Saunders says it is projected to make 30 to 40 times that, which could amount to as much as $140 million.

To date, the company’s best-selling item is the chicken southwest salad. In 2018, the company introduced sandwiches (and won a packaging award in the process). This year, they are rolling out protein bowls—and even contemplating sushi.

The idea of eating raw fish from an airport machine might put some people off, but Saunders is convinced the idea has merit. And it’s not just intuition. Every time people buy something from Farmer’s Fridge, they are asked to fill out to a survey with their wish list. The most requested item? You guessed it.

Sushi in a vending machine is not an entirely new concept. Japan has them in troves. But for Americans to buy in will likely depend on a variety of factors, including how much confidence the fridge can inspire. “People get nervous about stuff like that, and I’m the guy who’s like, ten years ago, people were telling me that about salad,” says Saunders. “If you make good sushi, people will buy it. If it’s bad, they won’t buy it.”

That the company spent five years fine-tuning the design of its fridges suddenly makes sense considering every fridge bears the burden of luring customers. Back in 2013, the first fridge looked as if “a vending machine and a restaurant had a baby,” says Saunders. It came with wood paneling, fresh plants on the roof and astroturf. Now, the company has pared down the aesthetic in favor of something “clean and bright.” The plants are gone. The wood paneling has made way for powdered-coated metal.

But what the company has lost in rustic charm, it’s hoping to make up for in brand trust. This new design might not win any awards for hygge design—but it acknowledges that the fridge is just a shell, and the actual star is what’s inside it. Whether it comes with a side of soy sauce, or not.

How this anime-inspired mascot for the Catholic Church’s 2025 Jubilee incorporates traditions

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 09:30:00 +0000

Luce, the anime-inspired official mascot for the Catholic Church’s 2025 Jubilee, whose name means “light” in Italian, has been getting a lot of attention on social media. Some people love the cartoon and find her “cute,” but a few others consider her “unsuitable” and even “repugnant.”

The Vatican introduced Luce at a comics convention in Italy, with the goal of engaging young people and speaking about the theme of hope.

Designed by Simone Legno, the mascot with big blue eyes and blue hair, and rosary beads around her neck, represents a Catholic pilgrim. She is dressed in pilgrimage garments that were standard attire throughout the centuries. Her badge, the Pilgrimage of Hope, identifies the 2025 Jubilee. It shows blue, green, yellow and red figures embracing a cross that ends in an anchor at the base, a symbol of hope. The figures form an outline of a ship sailing over the waves, evoking images of travel.

I have long been interested in the central role played by pilgrimage in many faith traditions, culminating in an exhibition and book, “Pilgrimage and Faith: Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam” in 2010. Luce brings a contemporary perspective to the time-honored Christian pilgrimage tradition.

Pilgrimage symbols

The symbols that Luce carries serve as a reminder of the origins of Christian pilgrimage, which began with visits to the Holy Land, the place where Christ lived his life.

This pilgrimage was documented by a person who came to be known as the Anonymous Pilgrim of Bordeaux. He wrote in his diary “The Bordeaux Pilgrim” in 333 about his trip to the Holy Land when the basilica of the Holy Sepulcher, the site where Jesus was buried and is believed to have resurrected, was still under construction.

Luce carries symbols that have been associated with pilgrimage in Europe since the 12th century, particularly those connected to the shrine of St. James in northwestern Spain.

This Holy Land pilgrimage built a tradition of Christians not just visiting the holy sites but also returning with tangible souvenirs, such as a stone from the Holy Land, water from a well, or even a piece of cloth or a statue that touched Christ’s tomb. A sixth-century painted box now in the Vatican contains bits of soil and stones as souvenirs of places in the Holy Land.

The pilgrimage to honor St. James, one of Christ’s apostles, whose tomb was believed to have been found in northwestern Spain, became popular in the early 12th century. The pilgrimage route was called the Way of St. James, Camino de Santiago de Compostela. The pilgrimage guided the faithful through several routes across Spain, France and Portugal, culminating in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, in the north of Spain.

The itinerary of the journey, written in 1137 by an anonymous Frenchman, names natural landmarks, local customs and specific churches built to honor different saints. Along this route flowed artistic, economic and cultural exchanges. As was customary, pilgrims who returned after visiting St. James’ tomb adopted an emblem. Since the shrine was close to the sea, James’ symbol became a scallop shell that pilgrims wore to demonstrate their achievement.

Pilgrims were proud of these voyages that entailed much physical hardship as well as devotion. In the church of Santa Prassede, Rome, Giovanni de Montpoli, who describes his trade as preparing medicines, commissioned a 13th-century tomb slab showing himself as a pilgrim. He is dressed in a pilgrim’s fur overcoat to repel rain and retain warmth. He carries a staff and wears a wallet slung over his shoulder. A scallop shell adorning his broad-brimmed hat indicates that he had traveled to Compostela.

The popularity of the pilgrimage to St. James persisted through the Renaissance, supported by pilgrimage fraternities that helped people find companions for the journey and stay connected with each other after they returned. Sometimes subgroups of the fraternity even sponsored pilgrimage-related art such as a stained-glass window.

Evidence of such activities is seen in the monastery of Wettingen, near Zurich in Switzerland. St. James is depicted as a pilgrim in a stained-glass window dated 1522, donated by a Hans Hünegger and Regina von Sur. He wears a cloak and a hat decorated with pilgrim badges.

Pilgrim badges

By the middle decades of the 12th century, metal pilgrim badges were produced at low costs. They were soon available at shrines throughout Europe. Each pilgrimage location had its own distinctive badge.

Santiago’s scallop shell remained a universal pilgrim emblem over the centuries. A 19th-century stained-glass window in the church of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris shows 13th-century French King Louis IX—the only French monarch to be named a saint—with scallop shells on his cloak, even though his pilgrimage was to Jerusalem, not the shrine of Santiago.

Sometimes the Supper at Emmaus, when Christ met two disciples after his resurrection, was depicted showing the disciples as contemporary pilgrims.

One of the most memorable examples is Caravaggio’s painting from 1601, in the National Gallery in London, showing an astonished apostle wearing a scallop shell on his vest.

Luce, the pilgrim

Luce continues, as well as transforms, these traditions. In her large eyes gleam two scallop shells that reflect this thousand-year-old symbol. Like Giovanni de Montpoli in Rome, she wears a coat that shields her from the elements and she carries a staff. The yellow of the cloak references the color of the flag of Vatican City.

Like the 16th-century Swiss image of St. James, she wears a pilgrimage badge, this one proclaiming the Pilgrimage of Hope of the 2025 Jubilee. Her muddy boots indicate outdoor hiking, with which any young person can identify. She is depicted as female, representing all people, not just women.

Drawn in a contemporary and globally popular style, she suggests an openness to new encounters across the world.

Virginia Raguin is a distinguished professor of humanities emerita at the College of the Holy Cross.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This “Unflattering” Home Office Got a Dramatic Color-Drenched Makeover

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Industrial Design Case Study: Mighty Studios Tackles Solar Roof Shingles

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 19:11:50 +0000

GAF Energy developed a novel way to make solar power more accessible. But when they ran into a technical and aesthetic problem they couldn't solve, they turned to industrial design firm Mighty Studios to get the product market-ready.

Timberline Solar Roofing Shingle

OVERVIEW

GAF Energy, the leading roofing manufacturer in North America, has been developing a new solar roofing shingle system that is not only energy-efficient but also durable and attractive. GAF's ultimate goal is to make the solar shingle as easy to install as asphaltic tile, so that the system can be installed by a roofing contractor rather than a skilled solar installer.

While the solar shingle itself is rather durable and defined, other aspects of the system required further development. This included the raceway, or path where the electronic cabling passes through. This is found along the edge of each solar shingle. When solar shingles are stacked up on the roof, these sections form a channel, creating a raised feature across the roof. However, this feature—functional though it was—distracted from the system's appearance. Frustrated with their internal design attempts, GAF turned to Mighty Studios for some out-of-the-box thinking.

INSIGHT

Our internal team analyzed the CAD models against real-world installs and discovered overlapping features and overlooked details such as irregularities and compounding tolerances. In addition, GAF's laminating process of solar shingles resulted in an uneven mounting surface. As it turns out, their original parts cannot be mounted as accurately as their CAD model depicted. It is a well-known fact that construction tolerances are intentionally loose (0.125" – 0.25"), as the majority of a residential structure is wood—an organic material which expands and contracts—based on temperature and moisture.

These irregularities can create challenges for roofers who install the solar system because these professionals must contend with such anomalies as warped roofs, sagging boards, residential construction tolerances, environmental factors, among other issues.

With maximum functionality and an improvement in aesthetics as our goals, we added curvatures to flat surfaces, making it hard to spot visual distortion in surfaces. In addition, the crowned surfaces we designed are stronger and resist warping, similar to crowned car body panels. We also added flexible waterproofing skirts, which allowed the parts to conform to surface inconsistencies. Our design proved superior to GAF's original idea where wire covers were designed as rigid parts with unforgiving assembly features.

You can see more of Mighty's work here.

Core77 Weekly Roundup (1-21-25 to 1-24-25)

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 19:11:49 +0000

Here's what we looked at this week:

L.A. fires claim Gregory Ain's Park Planned Homes, one of America's first Modernist neighborhoods.

Telo Trucks' micro EV pickup truck will offer solar charging options. (Just don't get too excited about the range.)

Why a Tacoma and certain houses survived the L.A. fires.

Aquor Water Systems' good-looking, award-winning hose reel.

A wildly different take on cabinetry, by artist/designer Elliat Rich.

IDEO is offering an "AI x Design Thinking Workshop Series" online.

Clever design: The Boss Magnetic Cap speeds nailing for homebuilders.

Caran d'Ache's luxury pencil sharpener.

These beautiful Dune suspension lamps, by product/architecture firm Mayice, are hand-blown by glass artisan Eduardo Garuti.

Beretta has made an elaborate luxury shotgun, designed to honor Marco Polo.

The Smart Shissel is a unique spill-proof bowl design by Kosher Innovations.

A dramatic design for dispensing cigarettes (or pencils).

Festool's spirit level has a nifty storage feature.

Industrial design case study: Mighty Studios tackles solar roof shingles.

44 Practical Toy Storage Ideas

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 17:31:22 +0000

If you have kids or are expecting and want to organize their space the best way possible, you need to think not only about sleeping or diaper changing zone but also about playing, which is an important part of every child’s day. If your kids have a lot of toys and you are puzzling how to store them, you can go for some ideas that we are sharing with you today. Storage Units The most popular solution is to place the kids’ toys into a storage unit of any kind, anything that you have at hand. It can be an open storage unit like IKEA Kallax or a sideboard with drawers or a piece that inludes both. Open storage units look more lightweight and make all the toys visible. From one side, it makes the space look more cluttered, from the other side, toys become part of decor. Sideboards and cabinets will instantly declutter the space as all the mess will be inside. Still, nobody says that you should have mess, you can buy plastic cubbies or baskets and organize all the toys even labeling the baskets.

The post 44 Practical Toy Storage Ideas appeared first on Shelterness.

Festool Designs Spirit Level with Nifty Storage Feature

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 16:11:00 +0000

Due to its size, a spirit level can get beat up inside of a tool bag. Festool has come up with a nifty way of keeping theirs safe: Their design slides right into the handle of the Systainers that all of their tools come in. The little spring-loaded green blister locks it in place.

The bottom of the level is notched so it can ride on a pipe.

It's made out of anodized aluminum, and runs $65.

A Dramatic Design for Dispensing Cigarettes (or Pencils)

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 16:11:00 +0000

In the early- to mid-20th century, when smoking was popular, there was a type of cigarette dispenser that you'd leave on the table if you were hosting a party. It elevated the act of offering cigarettes into a little piece of theater:

As you can see by the design, you had to laboriously load the thing.

I never did learn what the thing was called; some have suggested "cigarette elevator," which doesn't yield good results from search engines. In any case, a Thai product brand called Qualy Design has adapted the cigarette thingy into something more wholesome, for kids:

Admittedly less dramatic. It's called the Dinsor, and it's easier to load than the cigarette thing; there are no dedicated sleeves.

Mistakes You Make When Watering Your Plants

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 11:51:48 +0000

Lack of water. Too much water. Watering at the wrong time. Watering leaves, not roots. These, and more watering mistakes can ruin your garden and make all your hard work a failure. Watering plants is likely the single most important maintenance job a gardener does.

Outdoor watering accounts for about 30% of the average household’s water use. Half of that is wasted because of poor watering practices. Here are some of the watering mistakes you could be making that retards, damages, or kills plants and wastes water.

Underwatering

It is easy to underwater plants. You pour water around the plant and it sits on top for a couple of minutes and looks like plenty of water. Often this is not near enough. Push your finger into the soil. If it is still dry an inch deep, keep watering. The soil should be moist 3 – 6 inches deep so the entire root structure can absorb water.

Overwatering

Plant roots need air as well as water to perform properly. Too much water causes root rot which prevents proper absorption of nutrients. It also attracts pests and fungal infections–weakening and eventually killing the plants.

To avoid overwatering, soak the soil once a week. Letting the dirt dry out helps grow strong roots and plants. If you are concerned that your plants need water, stick your finger into the soil. If it is still wet two inches deep, skip watering for another day or two.

Top Watering

Avoid watering the leaves, flowers, and stems of plants. Water sitting on foliage during hot days can scorch the plant. Water funneled into the crotch of leaves and stems may rot the plant and attract pests. Soak your plants around the root system. Consider using a soaker hose for large-leafed plants like cabbage where reaching the base of the plant to water can be a challenge.

This may seem counterintuitive because rain falls on the entire plant. The difference is that temperatures are usually lower when it rains and rain soaks the entire garden which preserves moisture in the soil around the plant root.

Poor Watering Timing

Avoid watering plants during the heat of the day. Plants cannot absorb enough water before evaporation dries out the soil. By watering early or late, you give the water time to soak into the soil and the roots can absorb more water and nutrients.

The best times to water plants are:

Early Morning.
Late Afternoon/Early Evening.
Late Evening.

Poor Water Drainage

Poor soil drainage allows water to pool around plants which can lead to root rot, pest infestations, and bacteria infections. Good drainage is beneficial for both watering and rainfall. Working compost, peat moss, or manure into the soil around plants makes the soil more porous and improves drainage of excess water. Amending the soil helps clay soil drain better and sandy soil retain moisture.

Not Mulching

Without mulch to keep moisture in the dirt, the soil around plants dries out quicker. Mulch keeps the soil moist longer–giving the roots more time to absorb moisture and nutrients. It keeps the soil cooler and reduces the amount of watering you need to do. You can mulch plants with compost, straw, pine needles, bark chips, and even newspaper.

Not Accounting For Plant Variety Watering Needs

Plants have different water requirements. Some succulents are happy to be watered once a month. Tropical plants like ferns need water every 2 – 3 days. Most garden vegetables need at least one inch of water per week to grow and produce well. Make sure you know how much water your plants need before settling on a “one size fits all” watering schedule that may overwater some plants and underwater others.

The post Mistakes You Make When Watering Your Plants appeared first on Homedit.

How TikTok’s near-death experience actually boosted the brand

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 11:30:00 +0000

Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture.

TikTok is fighting for its life in the U.S. over concerns about its parent company’s relationship to the government of China. But TikTok has also just enjoyed one of the best branding weeks ever, as its potential demise has been treated as a national emergency.

That sounds like hyperbole, but as you’ve no doubt heard, the president of the United States has literally intervened to pluck the popular video platform from its deathbed—for now, at least. Protecting this vital component of the internet’s attention-suck and dubious-trend infrastructure might not seem like a top government, or even societal, priority. But in the days leading up to a possible TikTok ban, Americans’ dependence on this virality machine went massively viral.

Content creators and influencers said goodbye and posted teary videos. Fans shared serious and jokey goodbyes of their own. Brands and ad agencies lamented the loss; as one marketer moaned, “There’s no substitute.” The platform’s wide-ranging cultural impacts were enumerated in the past tense. The New York Times asserted that TikTok had “changed the way we cook,” and publishers warned of an impending “vacuum” for bookselling. The frantic search for a replacement made an unlikely hit of a Mandarin-language app called RedNote. Rivals YouTube and Instagram angled to capitalize on the platform’s demise. Even Kevin O’Leary—the Shark Tank guy—managed to drum up attention for claiming he might buy TikTok. Concerns about espionage were waved away with sarcastic “Goodbye to my Chinese spy” memes.

More than a collective obituary, the outpouring amounted to an endless series of advance eulogies in honor of an entity that we, apparently, could never truly replace. It was, in short, a PR bonanza for TikTok.

This has been quite a turnabout. While clearly popular, with 170 million users, TikTok owner ByteDance has long been painted by detractors as a potential tool of the Chinese government, for collecting data on or even influencing its audience. During his first term as president, Donald Trump called for banning TikTok unless it found a U.S. buyer. The Biden administration later voiced similar concerns, and backed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, passed by Congress with wide bipartisan support. The upshot was that ByteDance had to find a buyer by January 19, or it would become illegal for key service providers including Apple, Google, and Oracle to distribute or support the app, effectively killing it in the U.S. The platform fought this all the way to the Supreme Court, which unanimously upheld the act, seeming to seal TikTok’s fate.

But as the pro-TikTok outcry swelled, the political appetite for actually shutting it down seemed to wobble, and the company took full advantage. Two days before the shutdown deadline, it blamed “the Biden White House” for failing to offer “clarity and assurance” to TikTok service providers to buy more time to find a solution, declaring that “unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called this “a stunt,” insisting there was “no reason” for action before the second Trump administration took office: “TikTok and other companies should take up any concerns with them.” That night, TikTok video feeds stopped working, replaced with a pop-up message blaming a law banning the app but adding: “President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok.”

And indeed the next morning, Trump—who, let’s not forget, had set the whole TikTok ban idea in motion in 2020—promised to stall the new law’s enforcement to work out a deal. The platform was operating again within hours. (Apple and Google have yet to make it available again in their app stores, however.) According to Similarweb, by the end of the day, it hit a record 106.8 million active daily users, well above its pre-ban average.

The legality of this maneuver is murky at best, and the Wall Street Journal has called it an “illegal amnesty.” Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that the narrative around TikTok has changed decisively. Trump now professes “a warm spot in my heart” for the platform, which he says helped him win over younger voters. And in a somewhat surprising and oddly timed chain of events, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew met with Trump last month at Mar-a-Lago, later received an invitation to his inauguration, and was seated front and center next to America’s Big Tech CEOs.

Still, the details of whatever Trump has in mind beyond the 75-day extension are vague, and the app could die again; foreign policy hawks are complaining about placating China, and some TikTok creators may not want to be part of a platform too-associated with Trump. In what sounds like a negotiating feint, the president is now suggesting the United States government itself should own “like half” of TikTok, which he says could be worth hundreds of billions, but would have “no value” without its U.S. audience. (Again, the legality of such an arrangement is questionable.)

Meanwhile, the TikTok faithful have been rewarded for their vocal support, the TikTok Shop sales barely missed a step, and hardly anybody seems worried about the app as an espionage tool—least of all Trump, who dismissed the importance of a geopolitical rival spying on “young kids watching crazy videos.” Rumors of potential buyers include MrBeast and Elon Musk.

And within a day or two of its resurrection, TikTok had spawned a fresh “health” trend that involves pouring castor oil in your navel. Yup, back to normal.

Elon Musk’s DOGE loses its logo, Tumblr dupes TikTok, and Crocs collabs with the Beatles

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 10:45:00 +0000

This week in branding news, a 10-year-old meme appeared as the face of a new federal department, Tumblr launched a TikTok-esque feature, and Crocs made some clogs inspired by the Beatles. Here’s what you need to know.

Various iterations of doge.gov from the week of January 20, 2025 [Screenshots: doge.gov]

DOGE’s WIP logo

The news: Directly after taking office on Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to rebrand the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE (sigh). The new department, set to be headed by billionaire Elon Musk, has been pitched as “an outside advisory group that would recommend government reforms and find $500 billion in annual spending to cut”—but it’s looking more and more like the USDS with a new, meme-ified name. Now DOGE seems to be having trouble deciding on a logo that won’t turn it into a laughing stock.

Big picture: DOGE’s name is a nod to a meme that’s more than a decade past its prime, which featured a photo of a Shiba Inu with a misspelled caption. The meme is also the face of the joke-turned-real-cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which Musk has financially supported.

When the doge.gov website debuted on Monday, it displayed an AI-generated Doge meme as its official logo—a reference to the deluge of AI slop that hit the web after Musk initially announced the project. Shortly afterward, that first logo was replaced with a more classic version of the meme. And, as of this writing, the website has no logo at all.

Why it matters: It’s unclear exactly why the Doge logos were taken down. What is clear is that elevating a concept that started with a meme into an actual federal department is merely an escalation of the new Trump administration’s rejection of convention in favor of all things absurd and, often, troubling.

[Screenshot: Tumblr]

Tumblr tries to go TikTok

The news: Ten years after it first teased the concept of Tumblr TV—a tab dedicated to discovering new GIFs (how very 2015)—Tumblr has finally launched the feature as a kind of TikTok wannabe.

Big picture: Tumblr TV (which, in its modern form, also supports video content) comes during a moment when plenty of TikTok users are searching for potential alternatives amid the app’s uncertain fate. Lemon8 and RedNote have both seen a massive spike in users; meanwhile, some former TikTok users are buying phones with the app pre-downloaded on eBay, as it’s no longer available on the App Store.

According to TechCrunch, Tumblr was also a destination for TikTok dupe seekers: A spokesperson reported that the platform “saw a roughly 35% increase in iOS app installs and a 70% increase in new users joining Communities, a feature that allows users to join various groups focused on specific interests.”

Why it matters: Tumblr TV might serve as a TikTok alternative if you were, say, stuck on a desert island with only one app downloaded to your phone, but as of right now, it’s just not cutting it. The interface is still quite GIF-focused, the video quality is subpar, and the default grid setting means that vertical swiping isn’t as smooth. In 2015, this might have blown our minds, but in 2025, it feels more like a blast from the past.

[Photo: Crocs]

A new Crocs collab

The news: A new Crocs collaboration might just take the cake for the wackiest shoes the brand has ever released.

Big picture: The new two-clog Crocs collection is a tribute to the Beatles’s 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine. One pair features the classic Croc silhouette decked out in the flattened, psychedelic aesthetic that defined the film. The other pair is designed to look like a literal yellow submarine, complete with portholes (through which each member of the iconic band peeps up at the wearer), tiny propellers, and a raised tower on top of the vessel. The shoes will be available online on January 28.

Why it matters: Crocs continues to demonstrate its innovative dominance with a strategy that purposefully defies expectation. One moment, the brand is making serious moves for the climate by going bio-based and recycling old clogs into new clogs; the next, it’s entertaining silly collabs with McDonald’s and making clogs for dogs—all while launching the occasional high-fashion silhouette, like the popular Salehe Bembury Crocs and punkabilly-inspired leather Crocs. It’s the brand that keeps us on our toes, literally.

Lego’s new brick set is a science class in a box

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 10:30:00 +0000

When it comes out later this year, the most creative new set of Lego bricks won’t be available in stores or from any traditional retailer. The only place you’ll be able to find it is in a classroom.

Lego Education Science is a new science-focused Lego set and educational tool from the venerable toymaker, with its signature bricks playing the literal building blocks of hands-on science experiments and lessons. Designed for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, Lego Education Science is an attempt to engage children in science through building with Lego bricks, along with guided lessons exploring dozens of scientific concepts.

Scheduled for release this summer, the kits are the latest product from Lego Education, a school-focused arm of the company that has been producing educational playsets for 45 years. Its kits are used in public schools across the country, including those in New York City’s Department of Education, the Los Angeles Unified School District, and Chicago Public Schools.

[Photo: Lego]

Lego Education Science is the company’s first attempt at creating a standalone teaching tool. Sets of the past have been more supplemental to existing curricula—an extra learning aide for after-school programs or as part of a science or robotics club. “Not every kid gets to go to an after-school program or an enrichment club. For us, that started to feel like a very, very big opportunity to make even more impact, and certainly to reach a much more diverse group of kids,” says Andrew Sliwinski, Lego Education VP and head of product experience.

[Photo: Lego]

Lego Education’s Science kits include more than 120 differentiated lessons across three grade ranges that can be explored using just the material in the box. Building with Lego is a central part of each lesson, but it’s also a gateway for making sometimes difficult scientific concepts easier—and more fun—to grasp.

“What we’re trying to do is figure out a way where we can make science engaging, creative, and collaborative, but oh yeah, make that fit in a 45-minute lesson in a classroom with a teacher that doesn’t have a background in science,” says Sliwinski. “It’s quite the design brief to make that work.”

[Photo: Lego]

Each lesson involves building something with Lego pieces, then using what was built to explore a specific scientific concept or phenomenon, from momentum to structural stability to biomorphology. The kits are designed to be used in groups of four students, with an online component that teachers use to guide a lesson plan, which typically starts with a playful scenario or storyline and often features a familiar Lego minifigure.

One lesson about earthquakes, intended for students ranging from third through fifth grades, is called Lemonade Shake, and involves a Lego character with a lemonade stand. The students put the lemonade stand on a shake table and connect it to a small motor included in the kit. When the motor is turned on, the lemonade glasses tumbles to the ground. The students then attempt to design and build their own lemonade stand that could better withstand the seismic force of another earthquake.

Ruthie Chen Ousley is Lego Education’s head of product for the science category, and a former elementary school teacher, and she says the familiarity of building with Lego helps students open up to scientific lessons that some might otherwise balk at. “What we find is that it’s really the combination of the different design choices that we’ve made that unlocks this level of engagement, from the storyline in the beginning that invites everybody in to think about this character and the immediate connection to the minifigure character that children have, to the array of Lego building elements and materials that they’re able to play with,” Ousley says.

[Photo: Lego]

Sliwinski says developing Lego Education Science took more than five years. Lessons are aligned with Next Generation Science Standards, the state and national standards used to normalize science curricula. In creating the tool, Lego Education integrated feedback from more than 150 teachers, and had hands-on testing by more than 3,000 students, which proved invaluable in the design process. “You have to cater for a really wide range developmentally,” Sliwinski says. “What a five-year-old can do and what a 14-year-old can do are different, even down to physical hand and finger strength. So we had to think about all of those details.”

The designers also had to contend with the reality that most kids already think of Lego as a toy. Sliwinski says it was important that the Lego Education Science kits weren’t just perceived to be toys—or worse, to be seen as toys trying to hide the fact that they are schoolwork. “We should never make chocolate-covered broccoli. The worst thing that we can do, I think, is try to take an educational idea, wrap it in a candy shell and try to get the kid to swallow it,” Sliwinski says. “What we really have to do is think about why should a kid be excited about this, why should a child think that this is interesting to them.”

The goal of the kits, Sliwinski says, is to make science more approachable to young children, and to see themselves when they hear the word scientist. “That’s not about just making science fun,” he says. “That’s about making science relevant more than anything else.”

This giant iPod Nano is actually a mirror

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 10:15:00 +0000

Retro tech is having an undeniable moment. We’ve seen the revival of the Game Boy and chunky keyboards. Courtesy of Sega, even the pager was recently made cool again. Now we can add the iPod to the list of “vintage” gadgets that America’s youth yearn to experience firsthand.

The L.A.-based design collective Drought is tapping into that desire with the iMirror, a behemoth 5-foot-tall replica of the iconic iPod Nano with a mirror instead of a screen (as the name suggests). The iMirror comes in six colors, retails for $375, and will drop online today at 3 p.m. ET in a limited run of just 200. Anyone who actually wants to get their hands on the device-turned-design object will need to act fast: According to Drought founder Jake Olshan, the iMirror’s first drop back in August “instantly went viral,” with all 200 mirrors selling out in the first minute.

[Photo: Drought]

Olshan’s fascination with all things retro is evident in Drought’s previous drops, which have included a “burning CD” candle in collaboration with Napster, a giant paper clip inspired by Microsoft Office’s mascot, Clippy, and a belt with a buckle fashioned to look like Internet Explorer’s early-aughts logo. It was only a matter of time before the iPod, which debuted in 2001, joined the ranks of aesthetic tech items from a bygone era. We should’ve known this was coming when Urban Outfitters started peddling the devices to Gen Alpha for $349 back in 2023.

[Image: Drought]

According to Olshan, who was born in 1997, the concept for the iMirror came from his own nostalgia for the tech (he owned the Classic, Shuffle, and Nano models back when iPods were hot). Picking a model for the mirror largely came down to the screen size, which was largest on the Nano.

“Beyond that, there were so many iconic elements of this iPod Nano and its campaign—the colors, the ads, the song choices for the ads,” Olshan says. “Also, thinking a couple years to decades down the line, I felt these would look best surviving the test of time as actual home decor and art pieces as well.” In 20 years, he adds, younger people will probably have no idea what the iPod was, “but they’ll be able to find out about them through these. I think it’s a cool way of paying homage to it.”

[Photo: Drought]

The iMirror comes with a stainless steel power button and frosted-glass text accents on the mirror, including the phrase “Find Yourself” above a song progress bar and a small battery icon in the top right. The iPod button’s up arrow has been replaced with the word Drought.

“I see this drop appealing to two main audiences: those who grew up with these items and feel a strong connection to them, as well as younger people who may not have experienced them firsthand but are drawn to their nostalgic appeal,” Olshan says. “On one hand, one group is holding on to what’s familiar, while the other is eager to be a part of it and experience that nostalgia.”

What’s the Roman salute? Here’s the history of Musk’s controversial hand gesture

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

How often do you think about the Roman empire? Elon Musk claims to think about it every day. Given his frequent references to Roman antiquity, I think we can take him at his word.

From airing his views on the fall of the Roman empire (demographic decline) to expressing his desire to see a “modern-day Sulla,” Musk’s views on ancient Rome demand our attention. Sulla, by the way, was the notorious first-century BC dictator who had hundreds of his political opponents murdered.

On January 20 at a rally to mark the inauguration of Donald Trump for his second term as president, Musk acknowledged the crowd: “I just want to say thank you, for making it happen. Thank you.” He then put his right hand over his heart before extending his arm, elbow-straight, at a roughly 45-degree angle, with palm outstretched and facing down. He then turned around to face the audience behind the stage to repeat the gesture.

From top: A neo-Nazi group salutes during a gathering in Orlando, Florida, in 2023; Elon Musk in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 2025. [Images: Sandi Bachom/Getty Images, Alex Wong/Getty Images

Many who saw it were quick to claim Musk was performing a Nazi salute. But the fact is that this straight-arm gesture was actually first popularized by the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, who ruled as a dictator in Italy between 1922 and 1943.

Musk’s supporters on social media—especially on the Musk-owned X—in turn pointed to Musk’s enthusiasm for ancient Rome. This was not a fascist gesture, they insisted, but a “Roman salute.” Several posted scenes from the 2005-07 TV series Rome, which depicts Roman salutes, as evidence in support of their claim.

But what, if anything, is the difference between a Roman and fascist salute?

No evidence from Rome

Those of us who research and teach Roman antiquity, as I do, will tell you there is no evidence that there was ever such a thing as a “Roman salute” in antiquity.

Martin Winkler, in his study of the history of the gesture, suggests that the Roman salute is a modern invention. For example, in one of the most complete iconographic monuments to Roman militarism and imperialism, Trajan’s Column (built in Rome in AD 113 with the spoils from the Dacian wars in what is now eastern Europe), there is not a single gesture akin to a Roman salute. Nor do we have any statues of Roman emperors or commanders performing the gesture.

The closest that we come to a Roman salute are representations of a palm raised, with elbow bent, in a sign of greeting—a little like a modern-day wave. None of this is remotely close to the straight-armed variety of the sort performed by Musk.

The Oath of the Horatii by Jacques-Louis David (1784 and 1785)

It was during the period of the French Revolution that the gesture was invented by revolutionary republicans who framed their politics as a revival of the Roman republic. The best example of this classicizing invention is Jacques-Louis David’s 1784 painting, The Oath of the Horatii, which shows the three patriotic Horatii brothers giving an oath to defend the republic against an attack by the rival city of Alba in early Roman history.

U.S. schoolchildren perform the “Bellamy salute” to the American flag in 1941. [Photo: Wiki Commons]

Later examples include a 1921 sculpture by François-Léon Siccard in the Paris Panthéon. This sculpture, The National Convention, is especially interesting because the Roman salute still has its French republican meaning—although the sculpture postdates the salute’s adoption by Italian fascists by two years.

Following the French example, the salute was adopted by other republics—including, in certain contexts, the U.S., from the late 19th century up until the early 1940s.

In fact, when an early version of the current American pledge of allegiance was introduced in 1892 at the Chicago World Fair, its recitation was accompanied by the “Bellamy salute”—a similar form of the gesture.

Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler salute a crowd after signing the Pact of Steel forming their alliance on May 22, 1938. [Photo: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images]

The road to fascism

The Roman salute’s journey towards being inextricably associated with far-right politics began when a movement led by the Italian poet and nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio occupied the then-Yugoslavian town of Rijeka in 1919. Rijeka, called Fiume in Italian, is a city on Croatia’s Adriatic coast that had a large Italian population at the time. Italian nationalists therefore saw it as rightfully Italian.

D’Annunzio, along with an army of Italian first world war veterans, occupied the city in 1919 to establish what they called the “Regency of Carnaro,” which lasted into the following year. During the short life of this city-state, D’Annunzio established a number of symbols and gestures that he claimed were derived from ancient Rome: the battle cry “alalà,” purportedly of Roman origin, and the “Roman salute.”

Prior to the occupation of Rijeka, D’Annunzio had been deeply immersed in the worlds of ancient Greece and ancient Rome. He wrote numerous poems and plays inspired by Greco-Roman antiquity and had also purportedly written the screenplay for Cabiria—a 1914 silent film set in ancient Rome at the time of the Second Punic War (against Carthage which lasted from 218 to 201 BC).

There are several scenes in which we see the salute that would reappear in Rijeka five years later. In the development of fascist symbolism, life imitated art.

Soon after this, when Mussolini founded the Italian fascist movement in 1919, he adopted D’Annunzio’s salute.

Although the modernist and classicizing elements within the fascist movement itself were in tension with each other, much of the classical symbolism of the Regency of Carnaro was adopted by Mussolini’s fascism.

Winkler suggests that D’Annunzio modeled himself on Julius Caesar, while Mussolini modeled himself on D’Annunzio. Mussolini’s fascism, which morphed into a political party, entered government in October 1922 after the now infamous March on Rome and by 1925 Mussolini had established himself as dictator of Italy.

Around the same time as the March on Rome, the burgeoning National Socialist German Workers’ party in Germany began to use the salute. By 1926 it was compulsory for members. Ever since, the Roman salute has been irreversibly associated with far-right nationalism and adopted by neo-Nazi movements around the globe. Few remember its 18th-century French revolutionary origins. Fewer still that it has nothing really to do with Rome.

Samuel Agbamu is a lecturer at the University of Reading.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A Breezy New Melbourne Home, Styled With Vibrant Colour

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 03:00:49 +0000

A Breezy New Melbourne Home, Styled With Vibrant Colour

Interiors

by Amelia Barnes

All products from Fenton & Fenton: Strut Dining Chair in Caramel. Good Times Dining Table in Oak. Bonnie Vase in Amber. Keiko Lamp in Ochre. Paloma Bowl in Sand. Patrizia Italiano – ‘A Sardazza’ Jug. Ellie Malin – In The Open Air I. Marnie Ross – Pink Afternoon.

All products from Fenton & Fenton: Marnie Ross – Distant Memories Of Cadmium Red. Queen Bee Bar Stool In Rosette.

All products from Fenton & Fenton: Margot Chair in Marmalade. Roommate Sofa in Ginger. Olympia Dhurrie in Sand & Mocha. Bedrock Coffee Table in Smoke. Paloma Bowl in Sand. Roly Stump in Papaya. Paloma Vessel in Sand. Utopia Cushion in Pumpkin. Utopia Cushion in Honey. Zulta Cushion in Spice Market. Il Mediterraneo Cushion In Pompeii. Brady Floor Lamp in Apricot. Kerrie Jeffs – Jardinie. Patrizia Italiano – ‘Occhi Belli’ Vase.

All products from Fenton & Fenton: Roommate Sofa in Ginger. Olympia Dhurrie in Sand & Mocha. Bedrock Coffee Table in Smoke. Isabelle Bowl in Amber.

All products from Fenton & Fenton: Mellow bench in Fern. Keiko Lamp in Sky. Ellie Malin – In The Open Air II. Marjorie Vase In French Blue. Ellie Malin – Facing West III. Ellie Malin – Facing West II. Show Off Sideboard in Soot. Greta Hounslow – Red Browed Finch At Carnarvon Gorge.

All products from Fenton & Fenton: Wilma Sideboard. Bamm Bamm Coffee Table Sunday 2-Seater Sofa in Pear. Emille Vessel Blush In Large. Isabella Bowl in Rose. Roly Stump in Nougat. Serengeti Rug in Rose. ‘Old Romance’ artwork by Carly Williams. ‘Silhouette 05’ artwork by Berny Bacic. Cushions coming soon.

Fenton & Fenton Roly Stump in Nougat.

All products from Fenton & Fenton: Brady Table Lamp in Apricot. Wilma Bedside Table. ‘Raes on Wategos’ artwork by Dan Bean. Emille Vessel Rossa In Small.

All products from Fenton & Fenton: Jetson Lamp in Cherry Tomato. Artwork by Liam Murphy. Other products coming soon.

All products from Fenton & Fenton: Ziggy Stump in Ochre. ‘Pink Afternoon’ artwork by Marnie Ross. ‘Youthless’ artwork by Liam Murphy. Isabella Bowl in Amber. Emille Vessel Blush In Large.

All products from Fenton & Fenton: Sunnyside Lounge Chair in Sky. Sunnyside Coffee Table in Sky. Frida Pot in French Blue – Large & Small. Patrizia Italiano – ‘La Polpess’ Vase.

All products from Fenton & Fenton: Sunnyside Lounge Chair in Sky. How To Refresh Your Bedroom With An Elegant ‘Less Is More’ Approach

Interiors

by Bea Taylor

This Federation Home In Sydney Hides A Refreshingly Modern Twist. Architecture – Studio Prineas. Photo – Anson Smart. Styling – Clare Del Mar.

Hannah-Lee Hughes and Joel Bowers’ Briar Hill home. Photo – Eve Wilson. Editorial Styling – Annie Portelli + Sarah Hendriks.

As the place for rest, a bedroom should be the ultimate retreat — a sanctuary away from the hustle and bustle of life.

If yours is feeling like it needs a refresh, we think a ‘back-to-basics’ approach is the best way to revisit and elevate the space, for sophisticated and refined look. Less is more, after all.

Start with the bed. Gone are the days of intricately upholstered ‘feature’ bedheads. Instead look for a simple, streamlined option that will anchor the bed to the room without pulling too much focus. Eva’s Delve Bed Frame is the perfect option for this with its cosy padded headboard and frame in neutral hues (plus it comes with in-built storage!).

A trend we’ve been noticing of late is a return to simplified and sleek bedding choices. Think less layers, uncomplicated patterns and minimal accessories.

Instead of crowding the bed with a mountain of scatter cushions, opt for a low-lying bolster cushion, paired with a couple of standard pillows. Or, find a bedcover that drapes across the whole bed and onto the floor, for a more refined ‘undone’ look.

The colour scheme for the whole room should be pared-back and tonal. In our moodboard above we’ve chosen browns, beiges, creams and whites with warm undertones. Add in an accessory or two in a standout, colour — like a luxurious burgundy, repeated a couple of times in the room — to break up the tonal palette.

When it comes to bedside tables, the memo is make it a statement, but don’t make it matching. In a room where the colour palette and styling is pared-down, a few statement pieces bring the interest without overwhelming the space. Our choice for a mis-matched pair of bedsides combines the playful, yet straight-lined silhouette of ELLISON STUDIOS’ Pepé Side Table with Lauren Lea Haynes Studio’s curved and textural NO.6 Sculptural Plinth.

Finally, elevate the room with art. Diana Miller’s petite ‘Lost and Found’ art piece works beautifully in our bedroom moodboard above by mirroring the colours and forms in the space, but also adding a pop of darker contrast next to the softer, yet larger, work by Ash Holmes.

Additional moodboard credits: (From left) ‘Sculptural Vessel’ in Natural Raku, 2024 by Simone Karras from Craft Victoria. ‘Lost and Found’ by Diana Miller. Enes Quilted Bed Cover in white from Saardé. Margot Baked Clay Linen Bolster Cushion from L&M Home. Ava Toffee Stripe Pure Linen Cushion from L&M Home. Small ‘Ochre Orbit’, Ornamental Vessel by Mali Taylor from Craft Vicotria. ‘Hold, Breathe’ by Ash Holmes from Hake House.

Need more home inspiration? Visit The Design Directory to discover our top picks in furniture, rugs, lighting and more!

48 Practical Wire Basket Storage Ideas

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 17:25:27 +0000

Baskets of all kinds are great for storage and organization, they are comfortable and give a certain vibe to the space. If you ask me, I’ll say that wire baskets are the best ones to organize for a number of reasons, and after you read them all and look at the ideas, you’ll be convinced, too! What Are Wire Basket Advantages? Wire baskets, unlike other baskets, are easy to clean, they can be washed in minutes and you can change them look with paints you like. Wire baskets can be used anywhere, from kitchens and entryways to bedrooms, and they look lightweight, which is good for small spaces. Wire baskets can be turned into functional shelves, and that, to my mind, is the main perk of these. How To Use Wire Baskets? Decor Besides all the storage uses, wire baskets can be part of your decor, and you can make lovely floral and seasonal arrangements there, for example, place blooms in vases or a Christmas tree, pinecones with lights and so on. Wire baskets may not fit every interior but they will look nice in Scandinavian, modern and industrial spaces.

The post 48 Practical Wire Basket Storage Ideas appeared first on Shelterness.

Why small acts of care matter now, more than ever

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 17:00:00 +0000

For many of us, it’s a terrifying time to be alive. Wars are breaking out around the world, with death tolls rising daily. Cities are burning, as climate change exacts its toll. Democracy is on the decline and authoritarianism is rising—including here in America.

In the face of so much instability, I’ve been paralyzed. I haven’t had it in me to take to the streets in protest. I’ve been pouring what little energy I have into caring for my children, looking out for my neighbors, gathering with friends. This caregiving feel so paltry in the face of global tragedy. But what if it’s not? What if small acts of care are actually profound acts of resistance?

Cameron Russell, the author and activist, wants us to rethink caregiving. She’s just launched an art exhibition called The Art of Care at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, alongside her longtime collaborator, the photographer Mei Tao. The show elevates acts of care into works of art. It displays sweaters and quilts crafted to keep a loved ones warm, along with photographs of haircuts, meals, and made-up games to children to keep us entertained.

[Photo: courtesy The Art of Care]

The show makes the bigger argument that caregiving is transformative. Acts of care allow us to keep one another healthy and happy, but they also foster stronger, kinder, and more stable communities. They allow us to gather the strength we need to eventually rise up and create more systemic political change.

[Photo: courtesy The Art of Care]

It’s an important message now, at the beginning of a new administration whose policies will harm undocumented immigrants, transpeople, and women. “This past election, I felt so powerless,” she recalls. “I had to sit with the reality that there is so little I can do as an individual. But then I realize that through caregiving, we build the muscle, and labor, and skill we need to resist.”

Caregiving In Fashion

Russell is best known for her work as a model in the fashion industry, which she documents in her recent memoir, How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone. Scouted at 16, she quickly rose through the industry, appearing on the covers of Vogue and Elle; walking the runway for Chanel and Louis Vuitton; and starring in ad campaigns for Calvin Klein and H&M. But it didn’t take long for her to see firsthand the injustices that occur at every stage of the fashion industry, from the sexual harassment that models endure to the garment workers who labor under unsafe conditions while struggling to feed their families to its gargantuan climate impact.

[Cover Image: Random House]

In her book, Russell describes how she was both a victim of the industry’s evils, but also complicit in them. She experienced sexual harassment at the hands of photographers and agents, while simultaneously acknowledging that she was getting paid enormous sums of money to market clothes for brands that abused their workers. It took her years to make sense of it all. She responded by becoming an activist. She began attending—then organizing—protests to fight for garment workers’ rights and demand that brands be accountable for their environmental impact.

But then it became clear to her that caregiving is effectively a form of activism. “Care work was my respite from feeling powerless,” she says. “Taking care of the people that I can tangibly reach is a place where I have agency and can make a difference. But as I looked at some of the wisest and most skilled caregivers, I realized that they knew how to go bigger, turn these acts of care into broader systemic change.”

To Russell, one form of caregiving was looking out for other models in her orbit and listening to their experiences of sexual harassment and rape. But she saw that this simple act of care could also become a form of activism. In the midst of the #MeToo movement, she began anonymously posting these stories on her Instagram account. These stories went viral, helping to draw attention to systemic problems in the fashion industry.

[Photo: courtesy The Art of Care]

Acts of Care Are Political

The Art of Care exhibit is a natural extension of this work. There are carefully knitted sweaters and handmade wooden chairs displayed as works of art. On the walls, people in the community have shared pictures of artifacts that reflect caregiving, like birthday cakes and flower crowns. There’s a joyful portrait of musician RoseLove Joseph playing the ukulele to her daughter Ilani Ma’at Neter while they’re out in the snow.

There are large photographs made by Russell’s friend and collaborator, Mei Tao, a fashion photographer who has shot everyone from Michelle Obama to the stars of Bridgerton. Here, Tao turns her lens towards lesser known subjects, like her father. In one photo, he’s wearing a baseball cap from Emory University. Tao explains that she brings him caps from all the places she visits, so he can feel like he was part of the journey. In another, she photographs a Chinese meal. “At home, we would put newspaper on the table, to keep the table clean,” she says. “It’s an immigrant thing.” (Tao was born in China and raised in Brooklyn.)

Russell has contributed images, too. Her grandmother, for instance, loved painting everything in her home bright colors. In one photo, this grandmother paints Russell’s sister’s face. In another photo, Russell’s sister looks up while relatives give her a haircut.

The show makes it clear that care work can also be political. It was her son, a freshman in high school, who reminded her of Gandhi’s acts of caregiving. We often tend to think about Gandhi as a powerful organizer, who led campaigns of non-violent resistance against the British in an effort to help India gain independence. But, in a panel at the exhibit, Russell describes how Gandhi also spent hours at a spinning wheel turning cotton into thread which would be woven into fabric.

[Photo: courtesy The Art of Care]

Making fabric was a way for Gandhi to create garments that would clothe the people around him. But it was also a radical act. At the time, the British controlled the global textile trade. The British government took Indian cotton to England to be turned into cloth, which it then sold back to Indians at a large markup. It was yet another way for the colonizer to extract wealth from the colonized. For Gandhi, making cloth was a way of demonstrating that Indians could be economically independent from the British, paving the way for their political independence. “There was so much meaning in that act,” Russell says. “He was reclaiming culture, refusing to dress like the colonizer. He was divesting from the economy, which ultimately allowed India to reject foreign rule.”

For Russell, Gandhi’s example is powerful, particularly as someone who is embedded in the fashion industry, where clothing continues to be tied to oppression. But it also says something bigger about caregiving. The personal is political. The small acts of care we show our families and communities are connected to broader systems of power. They nourish us and give us the strength to fight when we need to. “Movements require a collective,” she says. “And by taking care of each other, we gather the strength we need to move forward.”

A Unique Spill-Proof Bowl Design

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 16:19:59 +0000

Within the Jewish faith, there is a practice called netilas yedayim shachris, which means "morning handwashing." The idea is that as one sleeps, spiritual impurities settle upon the body; thus the practice is to wash one's hands immediately after waking up, using a special cup to pour water over one's hands. The water is caught by a bowl. Because bathrooms are considered impure, this is typically done next to the bed.

As you can imagine, this presents a UX challenge. The practitioner now needs to carry a bowl filled with water—water now considered impure—to a sink in order to dump it out. Right after waking up, when they're likely groggy. Spilling the water is a common problem, particularly with children.

Thus Kosher Innovations, a Canada-based company that applies product design to Jewish needs, has invented this Smart Shissel ("shissel" means "bowl"). Once you pour water into it, it drains into a compartment within the bowl and cannot be spilled, even if you turn the bowl upside down:

To drain it, there's a child-safe plug in the side that you open.

There is one remaining hassle, in that the bowl has to be cleaned, and you cannot directly access the drain compartment. The company recommends the following: "Fill 1/10 of the [included] Smart Shissel cup with bleach and 9/10 water. Pour in during the day and let sit until night, emptying when getting ready for bed, before setting water for the morning." No one said religious adherence would be easy.

The Beautiful Dune Suspension Lamp, by Mayice

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 16:04:38 +0000

This striking Dune suspension lamp is by Mayice, a Madrid-based product design and architecture firm.

The housing is a single piece of hand-blown borosilicate glass. Suspended within is a cylinder of wood veneer that serves as the diffuser, and is slit along the bottom. Inside the veneer is a dimmable LED light source.

Although this is in production, no two are exactly alike, the housing being hand-blown. Each lamp is signed by the glass artisan, Eduardo Garuti.

This lamp is technically called the Dune Horizontal. There's also a Dune Vertical variant that doesn't quite do it for me.

The veneers are available in a number of different colors.

The Dune lamps are in production by Spain-based lighting company LZF.

Beretta's Elaborate Luxury Shotgun, Dedicated to Marco Polo

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 16:04:37 +0000

Italian firearms manufacturer Beretta has unveiled a shotgun designed to honor Marco Polo.

The unusual one-off, meant to celebrate Polo's legacy as the explorer who connected Europe and Asia, took some 2,000 hours to craft; made of walnut with copper inlays, it features hand-engraved depictions of Polo's travels.

The piece is based on Beretta's SO6 EELL Sparviere platform, an over-and-under design for hunting and sport shooting. "Sparviere" means "sparrowhawk" in Italian; it references the unique design of this platform, where the side plates open like that bird's wings.

As for why the gun was made: "As a company, we try to follow Marco Polo's attitude to explore: we spend our existence pushing our boundaries and expanding our horizons, we research to find always new solutions, techniques and materials and provide hunters and shooters with innovative and unconventional products," says Beretta CEO Carlo Ferlito. "The craftsmen of our Pietro Beretta Selection atelier managed to astound us again with this unique shotgun, going beyond the limits of their immense skills and showing us something unprecedented."

Stay Tuned to Your Ancestral Heritage

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 16:04:37 +0000

The Core77 Design Awards Medical & Healthcare category features equipment, devices, consumables, and technologies used for diagnosing, monitoring, treating, or preventing health issues. Products that are essential for maintaining well-being, managing chronic conditions, providing care, and ensuring public health. Elements can be utilized in various settings, including hospitals, clinics, laboratories, and homes.

From Ben Beck's perspective forged over four decades as a designer, the rapid pace of acceleration in the world poses "multi-dimensional challenges." To meet these challenges, says Ben, "We might need to stay tuned to our ancestral heritage as we critically view the future."

He's viewing that future through his lens as CDO of ELEVEN, a human-centered design studio that integrates research, strategy, design, and engineering under one roof. Since its founding in 1996, ELEVEN has generated $1.3 billion in sales of its licensed products. Ben's creative reach has touched a broad range of clients including Burton Snowboards, OXO, Herman Miller, Bauer Hockey, P&G, Whirlpool, Keurig, Staples, Sharp, Polycom, Samsung, Titleist, MGB, and Zoll Medical.

Ben is also a co-founder of Healthcare Innovation Partners (HIP), a group of designers, engineers, doctors, and entrepreneurs dedicated to finding, developing, and delivering better healthcare products, medical innovations, and devices to the healthcare market. Ben is credited with over 70 patents, numerous awards including IDSA/IDEA, iF, Red Dot, Core77, and Good Design, and publications in Time, Newsweek, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, and Innovation. Ben is also a frequent guest speaker, juror, and critic at RISD, BC, MIT, WIT, MassArt, CES, and IDSA.

While the challenges ahead may be complex, Ben remains optimistic, thanks in large part to his talented colleagues. "Our small yet diverse team of creatives at ELEVEN inspire me every day and give hope that the world can be a better place to live in the future."

For this year's awards, Ben invites submissions that demonstrate thoughtful, holistic problem-solving and ingenuity—designs that not only innovate but resonate with human needs and aspirations. As he aptly advises, "Projects that reflect profound insights into complete, thoughtful solutions are the ones that truly stand out."

The 2024 winner, Aescape Robotic Massage System, designed by Whipsaw.

Aescape was founded by Eric Litman, a highly accomplished serial entrepreneur and engineer. He smartly leveraged good design from the get-go, stating "We must make sure the machine is centered around the user experience. It must work better than a human and be gorgeous too."

The 2025 Core77 Design Awards would like to see your medical and healthcare innovations – no prescription required. Submit your work for consideration today.

Enter your work in the Core77 Design Awards today.

Inside the design of ‘Skeleton Crew,’ Lucasfilm’s bid to recapture the joy of old ‘Star Wars’

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 10:30:00 +0000

Skeleton Crew is 10-year-old me’s favorite Star Wars show. The series follows four children who escape the boring planet of At Attin in search of adventure only to try to get back to it chased by a space Long John Silver and a cohort of bloodthirsty, gold-hungry pirates.

The premise itself is charming enough, but really it’s the design of Skeleton Crew’s world that is responsible for its real magic. Every aspect of the production design has been carefully developed to serve a single objective: to view the galaxy far, far away through the eyes of a kid who sees it for the first time.

The show is filled with details that make you feel like a kid watching Star Wars. Like its protagonists, four space Goonies. Or the instantly iconic spaceship they find buried in their neighborhood’s backyard forest, which takes them to a pirates’ cove in the middle of a nebula (one that looks like the cosmic version of a bay somewhere “deep in the Caribbean”).

There’s also a fantastic alien owl who is an astronomer, a robotic first mate with a creature living inside his head, an ancient booty in the heart of a booby-trapped secret maze, and Jude Law just being Jude bloody-damn-hot Law chasing a legendary treasure planet. Ultimately, though, it’s the way the production team built this new (old) world that made it all click as an experience that struck my 8-year-old kid and my grown-up self with a 1.2-gigawatt lightning bolt of happy feels.

That energy came from the vision of its co-creators, Jon Watts and Christopher Ford. It permeates every single set, creature, light source, music note, camera move, edit, and color-grade choice in this show. In my opinion, Skeleton Crew is more worthy of its opening Lucasfilm logo than The Mandalorian or Andor. Because, while I love those shows too—Andor remains adult me’s favorite Star Wars story—each Skeleton Crew episode has the ability to instantly fire up the warm popcorn aroma and static electricity of a theater full of people waiting for the first notes of a John Williams or Alan Silvestri score.

“That vision started from a very simple place: We wanted to tell the story about a group of kids who didn’t know much about the Star Wars universe getting lost in the Star Wars universe,” Watts tells me during a video interview. The director—known for the three Marvel Spider-Man films, Homecoming, Far From Home, and No Way Home—says, “When you decide you’re going to tell this story from a kid’s point of view, it affects everything aesthetically from that point on.” Ford, who previously worked with Watts on Spider-Man: Homecoming, agrees: “What is the feeling? The feeling is being 10, yearning for adventure, and then suddenly being in way over your head.”

Watts and Ford’s first directive to the design team was to create things that might feel overwhelming to a kid. “Like how to scale things so the kids feel small in a much bigger world; how to make the ship feel really unwieldy and dangerous and hard for them to fly,” Ford explains. “That was sort of our entry point and kind of the simplest perspective that you take on those decisions.”

Watts brought on Oliver Scholl, who worked with him on Spider-Man: Homecoming, as Skeleton Crew’s production designer. He remembers that he didn’t hesitate at all, not only because it was Star Wars but because he loved that vision. “The kids are standing in for us, re-exploring the Star Wars universe from a young perspective,” he tells me during a video call. It gives everyone the opportunity to frame a mythology like we experienced it in the first place, without complications. “It was exciting because it’s not a serious or gloomy film. It’s fun storytelling and entertainment.”

Designing a Familiar feeling

Working with Watts; Ford; Lucasfilm’s executive creative director, Doug Chiang; and Industrial Light & Magic’s chief creative officer, John Knoll—plus The Mandalorian’s co-creators, Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni—Scholl embarked on a similar journey of discovery, which started at the kids’ world, At Attin.

Watts and Ford were excited about exploring the middle-class aspects of Star Wars, unlike the usual focus on the extremes of the galaxy. Lucasfilm’s Chiang says that before the project took off, Filoni and Favreau told him about Watts and Ford’s “domestic” Star Wars-through-a-kid’s-eye pitch. “They asked me to do some art for it, basically to frame it,” Chiang says. “Sort of without really knowing the context of what’s important, we did a bunch of art to show a residential suburban Star Wars with these kids going on this journey. And that pitch art was what started the project.”

When the preproduction started, creating this suburb was the first order of business. “Star Wars and other movies of the time—like Blade Runner—had a specific language set up for urban environments,” Scholl tells me. They were more fantastical than realistic, like Coruscant, the world city capital of the Republic that we saw in the Star Wars prequels and Andor, a TV show that Watts found very interesting because it also showed mundane places in this galaxy. “We wanted to capture the spirit of being in a safe but boring place, and wanting to escape from school, parents, and homework,” Watts says—a middle-class suburbia that is the only home they know before getting sucked into a chain of events that take them to outer space for the first time ever.

To convey this, they designed two main areas in At Attin: the city center and the suburbs. “The city center is based on American city layouts,” Scholl says, “but it also incorporates elements from brutalist Soviet Eastern European and Japanese urban planning studies. This stiffness and rigidity fit the story, as the city has been set in its ways for a long time.” For the suburbs, where the kids grow up, they wanted to create Star Wars-like middle-class houses. The showrunners wanted to evoke “a Goonies feeling.”

Initially, Scholl says, they went too far with the Star Wars sci-fi element, and the houses didn’t capture what Watts and Ford wanted. Then they took a different approach. They set the houses in the middle of rolling hills and forests, inside a cookie-cutter urban development that feels very much like ’80s American suburbia. “Our touchstone was Steven Spielberg’s work on ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which depicted ordinary life and family love, and then transform that into Star Wars,” Chiang explains.

The resulting vehicles, droids, costumes, and interiors were developed to evoke Earth’s objects. “The magic of designing for Star Wars,” Chiang reminds me, “is that it is 80% grounded in our terrestrial reality.” Take the city’s school bus, whose bench seats are identical to those found on a school bus today. The designers simplified the exterior by keeping it a clean box shape. Then they add two of these buses’ seats in tandem, creating a sort of “twin bus” effect.

“By taking something familiar from the inside and twisting it slightly, we repackage it to create something fresh and new, which the audience immediately understands as a school bus because they’re familiar with the shapes and layout,” Chiang says.

This approach was pioneered in the early days of Star Wars, when designers repurposed model parts and shapes from the real world to create places and vehicles. Boba Fett’s spaceship design, for example, was famously taken from a modern street lamp. “We didn’t just ask what suburbia would look like. Instead, we defined the shape language to ensure it spoke to Star Wars while also informing the world we were creating,” Chiang says.

When it came to designing the houses of At Attin, the team arrived at a triangular rooftub structure that created slopes when viewed from a distance. Chiang says that the repetition of these roofs on the tract homes resulted in distinct shapes and silhouettes. Though the homes feel different from each other individually, in aggregate they feel familiar.

The same is true for the home interiors, which have that ’80s feeling fused with Jetsons’-like sci-fi details. These were all built as one real full-size set which, as Knoll tells me, was partially rebuilt and redressed through the production to depict the different-yet-similar homes of the protagonists.

“It fits right in the production design of the show. All the houses were meant to look like they were kind of built in one era with one style, and there are some smaller houses and bigger houses,” Knoll says. “Fern lives in a more exclusive neighborhood where the houses are bigger, with an upstairs with a larger balcony, but it’s still very much the same style of architecture and most of the pieces are shared between them.”

The fifth character

While At Attin is the center of the storyline, viewers barely see it after the kids find the buried spaceship that becomes their Millennium Falcon. Called the Onyx Cinder, the spaceship is a mystery that is key to solving what’s going on in At Attin.

Scholl tells me that the Onyx Cinder was fun for him to design because of his background as a concept artist. “Everybody wanted to do it, and we all had our ideas of what it needed to look like,” he says. There were many conversations between him, Chiang, Ford, and Knoll about how it should look. The ship is not what it seems at the beginning. (Spoiler alert: It’s encapsulated in a menacing clunky shell that hides a really sleek vehicle that gets revealed in a critical moment of the series.)

“The key for its first design was the ironclads,” Scholl says. These were the first warships that were steam-powered and protected by steel or iron armor, first employed during the American Civil War in 1862 to easily destroy wooden warships. “Doug and I wanted to do something a bit more intricate in the beginning,” he tells me, but then they kept looking at the ironclads and their brutal simplicity. They also needed the Onyx Cinder to look like it came from a different era, so this starting point was perfect for it.

It also had to call back to Star Wars elements. The asymmetrical position of the cockpit, for example, connected it to the design of the Millennium Falcon. The surface of the clunky, armored Onyx Cinder is textured like Han Solo’s ship too, with lots of tubes and boxes. And there are typical elements of other ships, like the gun turrets and the loading ramp.

The ship’s interior feels different from the exterior. While it’s covered in dust, skeletons, old pirate gear, and roots from wild plants that grew after the ship was buried, its design is surprisingly smooth and futuristic. The cockpit—which looks like Queen Amidala’s Naboo Royal Ship from the prequels—tells the story of its true nature: This is actually a ship from the era of the Old Republic.

Like the Falcon, the Onyx Cinder is its own character, which evolves with the show. For most of the series, it’s this clunky, massive vehicle that seems to be falling apart. “Every time it goes into a hyperjump, it will leave dust and branches behind it. It’s really funny,” Scholl says, just like when the roadrunner runs off leaving a cloud of dust behind him. But in one crucial point in the series, it sheds its armor that surrounds it as well as its frontal engines, revealing a smooth, blueish-black wedge-shaped body with just four engines on the back. It is like a butterfly coming out of an ugly caterpillar, perhaps a metaphor of the four kids coming of age at the end of the series.

The Onyx Cinder also comes with another iconic character: a robot called SM-33—or “thirty-three,

Mistakes People Make When Shopping for Furniture

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 10:22:31 +0000

It should come as no surprise that purchasing furniture can be difficult; however, because furniture is expensive and making poor decisions is costly, it is well worth the extra effort to find the best options for your space.

Many shoppers become engrossed in the excitement of buying furniture in the moment, overlooking critical factors that will ensure that their purchases meet their needs. Mistakes, whether in terms of practicality, proportion, or personal style, can be frustrating, but by approaching this process with careful consideration and a clear plan, you can avoid common pitfalls and create a space that you will enjoy for years to come.

The majority of furniture purchases require careful thought and planning, but this doesn’t mean you can never buy on the spur of the moment. Keep a running list of the ideas listed below with you so you can snag that perfect mid-century sofa you discovered while browsing your local antique store. Before you buy it, go through your checklist to ensure that the piece you find meets all the requirements on your list, and you will be able to walk away with your new sofa feeling great about your purchase.

Skipping Measurements

Underestimating or overestimating the size of a piece of furniture is one of the most common reasons for returns. It is easy to fall in love with a piece in the showroom without thinking about how it will fit in your room or through the doorways to your home.

Make accurate measurements of each room you want to furnish, and consider the ideal-sized pieces and layout for the space. You can even create a simple floor plan to visualize different layouts using different-sized pieces. Think about traffic flow and ceiling heights when deciding which pieces will work best in your rooms.

Overlooking Proportions

A piece may technically work in a room but does not look or feel right in that room, which is most commonly due to a mismatch between the room and the furniture proportions. Furniture that looks to bulky might make a room feel cramped, while a piece that is too slim and spare can disappear in a large room. Achieving the right balance in the room involves the consideration of the scale of each piece and also how they fit together.

Consider the size of the room and the height of the ceilings. In general, larger rooms require more substantial pieces, while smaller rooms work well with lighter, slimmer furniture. Even though this is a great general rule, it is best to make sure every room has a mix of pieces that have different proportions, so always try to mix it up so that there is an overarching balance.

Neglecting Lifestyle Needs

Your furniture should serve you, not the other way around, so choosing furniture that fits your needs is a vital consideration. It is essential to think about how the furniture will be used and who will be using it before you buy it to ensure that it is comfortable, useful, and durable for your lifestyle. For example, delicate fabrics will not hold up well on sofas for movie nights with kids and pets.

When deciding on the best type of furniture for each room in your home, consider the construction, upholstery type, durability and maintenance requirements, comfort level, and storage capacity.

Ignoring Your Budget

It is easy to get carried away by eye-catching designs without considering the consequences. Ignoring your budget may feel great in the moment, but it will not create long-term satisfaction.

Before you go shopping, determine how much you are willing to spend. Prioritize your purchases with the most important pieces getting the majority of your budget. Invest in quality key pieces like a sofa, bed, or dining table and save on less critical pieces and decorative items where quality and durability are not as vital.

Prioritizing Looks Over Comfort

While aesthetics are essential in a visually appealing room design, furniture is meant to be used, and if it is uncomfortable or wears out quickly, it is not right for you. Even the most attractive pieces can become a source of dissatisfaction if they do not meet your needs over the long term.

Consider how a piece of furniture will feel during regular use before committing to a purchase. Whenever possible, read reviews of the experience of others to see if it held up to expectations. Also, study the construction and materials of the piece to ensure that it is the quality that you want.

Skipping Material Considerations

If yours is a high-paced and busy lifestyle or you have an active family with pets and young children, material considerations are one of the most vital priorities when buying furniture. Certain fabrics may look attractive initially but are not durable or easy to clean.

Upholstery options like leather, microfiber, olefin, certain cotton weaves and blends, wool, and wool blends are some of the most durable in wear and tear. Always look for performance fabric options because these are pre-treated to make them resistant to staining and wear. Delicate upholstery fabrics such as silks and chenilles are best suited to furniture in low-traffic areas.

Not Considering Your Current Furniture

Unless you are planning to purchase everything new in the space, it is vital to think about your existing pieces. When you are shopping for new pieces, think about how this new piece will work with the styles, upholstery colors, wood tones, and patterns in your current furniture.

To create a cohesive look, consider a unifying theme that creates harmony in the design. This might be complementary colors, shapes, or finishes that bring the room together. Always purchase pieces that will enhance rather than clash with these overarching themes.

Rushing Decisions

Rushing furniture decisions, like quickly finding a piece to fill a gap, can lead to regrettable purchases that do not align with your lifestyle or budget. Rather than rushing this decision, take time to evaluate each purchase and choose the best possible piece, even if it takes longer than you want. This will lead to better purchases and make you a more thoughtful consumer in the long run.

Buying Only New Pieces

Not considering second-hand pieces can be a missed opportunity for unique finds and significant savings. Many pre-owned pieces are still in good shape and often offer great quality that can be hard to find in new pieces for the same price.

When you have this mindset, you are more open to different types of pieces, from antique treasures to retro gems, that can give your home a more distinct personality. Even if you have to refinish or reupholster worn or outdated pieces, you will often save money and end up with a higher-quality piece than if you bought new furniture of the same type. This is also a more environmentally friendly way to buy furniture, helping to reduce waste in landfills.

Overlooking Return Policies

Even with the best laid plans, furniture purchases can go wrong. If you buy a piece of furniture that doesn’t work for you, you want to make sure that you can return it with as little inconvenience, cost, and trouble as possible.

Consider policies that dictate if return is even possible, the return window (how long you have to return something), potential restocking fees, the return shipping costs, exchange options, and the condition of the returned furniture. Before you buy something, consider the possibility of a return to decide if this purchase and the potential return are worth it.

Not Testing Key Items in Person

In these days of online shopping, we never need to leave our homes to completely furnish our houses. While online reviews and dimension guides are helpful, they do not always tell a complete story. This can be particularly detrimental in key pieces where comfort and longevity are most vital.

For items like sofas, mattresses, and chairs, it is especially essential to physically test them. Sitting on and personally inspecting these pieces will give you a good idea regarding their comfort and construction. This helps to ensure that you are getting exactly what you expect when you purchase the piece.

The post Mistakes People Make When Shopping for Furniture appeared first on Homedit.

Instagram is about to look a lot more like TikTok

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 10:15:00 +0000

The rectangular grid was just the beginning.

Instagram faced a user revolt after suddenly changing its longtime signature square grid to rectangles starting back on January 17, ruining some users’ carefully aligned profile grids. (R.I.P. Taylor Swift Evermore grid.)

Now, the platform says it has additional changes in the works to give users more control over how their profiles look. It’s true, the UI and UX updates should give users a lot more flexibility and control over their individual experience—but no matter what changes users make on an individual level, the app itself is about to look a lot more like TikTok.

“We launched a new tall grid on profile this week and I got a lot of feedback, both positive and quite negative,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri wrote in an Instagram caption Monday. “The goal is a simpler, cleaner place that maintains, and even increases, creator control.”

[Screenshot: Instagram]

WHICH INSTAGRAM FEATURES ARE CHANGING?

Here’s a rundown of the expected changes:

Adjust the crop of grid images: Users will soon be able to customize how their posts appear on the grid by letting them adjust the display crop of images and even reorder their grid entirely.

Post directly to grid: Instagram also plans to allow users to post directly to the grid without simultaneously posting to their feed.

[Screenshot: Instagram]

Highlights move to the grid: The platform is moving its Highlights feature, which allows users to pin stories to the top of their profile. “Highlights are a great way to showcase your favorite stories,” Mosseri said, but added “they are visually complicated and push your grid down” in their current placement. Soon, Highlights will move from their current position above the grid into a tab. They will also be integrated into a user’s profile grid itself.

[Screenshot: Instagram]

Vertical post format is here to stay: Mosseri said the change to a vertical, or rectangular, post format was “because most photos and videos that are uploaded to Instagram at this point are vertical and rectangles do a better job showing off those photos and videos.” TikTok popularized this format, but Instagram Story videos are also already formatted this way. Mosseri added that these plans “might change as we iterate over the next couple months,” but hoped that by sharing their intentions early it will “help avoid any more harsh surprises.”

[Screenshot: Instagram]

Reels get increased run time: Mosseri announced over the weekend that the length of Reels was being increased from 90 seconds to up to three minutes. Meta did not immediately respond to questions about the timing of other updates.

JUST ADD TIKTOK DANCES

Instagram’s implemented the switch to a vertical layout after TikTok’s ban went into effect in the U.S., which President Donald Trump temporarily delayed enforcement of for 75 days with an executive order. TikTok is still vulnerable, though, as it’s not available to update or download in app stores. Instagram smells an opportunity to snag some of those disaffected daily active users.

The new layout format wasn’t the only step the Meta-owned app has taken to position itself as a TikTok alternative. On Sunday, Meta introduced the standalone Edits app, its dupe of the video-editing app CapCut, which is owned by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance. Meta has also offered cash bonuses to creators who agree to post their videos to Instagram and Facebook. Try out Meta, fellow young people, we have vertical layouts now.

But it’s not just the user experience that’s giving the tech company grief. Meta is facing wider blowback over non-design changes it’s made to its apps, like its end of fact checking in favor of X-style Community Notes, and its AI characters, which were deleted in the beginning of January.

Trump’s chaotic new border policy, in the rise and fall of two apps

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Overnight, changes to U.S. immigration and border policy are already having a real-world impact—and it’s even showing up in app stores.

The day after the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) shut down its CBP One app, which allowed migrants to apply for asylum and book appointments to legally enter the U.S., Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched an app of its own to provide information and services to Mexican nationals in the U.S.

Mexico’s new ConsulApp Contigo, which became available Tuesday, is described in the App Store as a “comprehensive care tool” for Mexican immigrants in vulnerable situations, with access to consular offices locations and information on legal rights and procedures. The name suggests the app is a consulate you can take with you. The app icon depicts a button with lines suggesting an alert emanating from it. According to its description, the app does not collect data.

[Screenshot: US Customs and Border Patrol]

THE CBP ONE APP’S SUDDEN SHUTDOWN

The launch of the app comes on the heels of new executive orders by President Donald Trump related to immigration and border policy that hardens the U.S.-Mexico border and cracks down on illegal immigration. Another order attempts to undue the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship protections, which grants U.S. citizenship to babies born in the U.S.

The CBP One app, launched by CBP during former President Joe Biden’s administration, allowed users to check border wait times, apply for a provisional entry to cross the border or for asylum, or schedule appointments at ports of entry. The app offered a civic design solution to solve immigration backups, providing a convenient way for people to access information and services on their phones.

A website for the app now says it is no longer available as of January 20, 2025, the day Trump took office, and existing appointments have been cancelled, leaving many migrants stranded.

[Screenshot: ConsulApp]

MEXICO’S CONSULAPP LAUNCHES AS A NEW DIGITAL RESOURCE

The most striking feature of the ConsulApp design is a red button at the bottom of the app that shows a phone icon labeled “Attention Button” with the instructions to hold for five seconds “if you need help.” The feature is designed for Mexican nationals facing detention. Press it, and a user’s emergency contacts and the nearest Mexican consulate will get an alert.

The app comes amid heightened concerns about what the Trump administration’s immigration policy changes mean for Mexicans in the U.S. The only Mexican Consulate with a 24/7 call center is in Tucson, Arizona, and it’s been inundated with calls, the head of the consulate Rafael Barceló Durazo tells AZPM, a PBS and NPR station in Southern Arizona.

“It’s very, very important for the people to understand that, regardless of their immigration status, they do have constitutional rights,” Barceló Durazo said.

As of this writing, the ConsulApp Contigo was No. 6 in Education on the Apple App Store. As the Trump administration works to implement its new border and immigration policies, expect it to rise even higher.

Trump can’t shake the real estate developer inside him

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 10:00:00 +0000

On his first day of his second term in office, President Trump signed dozens of orders and memoranda that outlined his positions on everything from foreign policy and immigration to gender identity, working from home, and TikTok. The contents of the executive actions—which have already triggered lawsuits—echo comments and promises he’s made since first hitting the campaign trail in 2015. And so it comes as no surprise that he revived another one of his obsessions: making federal buildings “beautiful” by prescribing traditional and classical architecture as the default style.

In a two-paragraph presidential memorandum titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Architecture,” Trump instructed the administrator of the General Services Association, Stephen Ehikian, the former VP of AI products at Salesforce, to submit recommendations for ways to “advance the policy that Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.”

You might recall that in his first term, Trump issued an 2,500-word executive order that proclaimed classical and traditional architecture to be the preferred style of federal buildings, and detailed a hot-or-not list of structures deemed beautiful (The Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol) and ugly (The San Francisco Federal Building, the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. U.S. Courthouse in Miami). Trads took a gleeful victory lap. Reputable architects condemned the notion of a prescriptive aesthetic. Biden eventually revoked the order when he took office in 2021.

Did we just rewind a nearly decade in political rhetoric? In some ways, Trump’s executive order reaches even further back into history. Classical architecture has a long history of serving as a political tool, particularly for authoritarian governments who sought to legitimize their rule by mimicking the style of Greek and Roman empires.

It’s not entirely clear how the memorandum will specifically affect architecture since it instructs the new GSA administrator to consider revisions to the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, a set of design standards that the government uses to “ensure that public buildings represent the interests and aspirations of the American people.” Originally drafted in the 1960s, the principles state that “the development of an official style must be avoided. Design must flow from the architectural profession to the Government, and not vice versa.” A spokesperson from the American Institute of Architects told Fast Company that “the 2020 White House Executive Order required input from the Fine Arts Commission, but the new directive issued Monday operates internally without needing additional approval.”

By requesting what is essentially a reversal of this long-standing core tenet, Trump is asking public buildings to represent his interests and aspirations. If the GSA wants to approve a federal building that deviates from regional, traditional, or classical styles (which are conveniently the aesthetics of Trump’s own properties, from his neoclassical New York City penthouse to his Spanish Revival Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida) before it submits the new policy recommendations, it will have to notify Trump, the memo states.

It’s the perspective of a micro-managing real estate developer intent on inspecting every change order. Meanwhile, Ehikian wrote in an email that he intends to prioritize efficiency at the GSA and “remove extremist Green New Deal and ESG (environmental, social and governance) requirements from federal building construction, leasing and procurement to prioritize economic efficiency over ideological mandates.”

Trump’s developer mindset revealed itself again as he signed other executive orders. A reporter asked Trump about the war in Gaza and if he’s confident about maintaining a ceasefire and he replied no before shifting his focus. “I looked at a picture of Gaza,” Trump responded from his desk in the Oval Office. “Gaza is like a massive demolition site. That place is—it’s gotta be rebuilt in a different way…It’s a phenomenal location. On the sea. Best weather. Everything is good. Some beautiful things can be done with it.”

Ever the opportunist, Trump can’t seem to shake the mindset of his pre-presidential profession even as his administration is confronted with higher stakes issues.

A 22-Square-Meter Apartment Transformed: Compact Luxury in Moscow

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 09:49:08 +0000

This 22-square-meter apartment was a heartfelt gift from parents to their 18-year-old daughter, Sasha. The family initially grappled with the challenge of making such a compact space functional and comfortable. They enlisted designer Olga Poliakova to transform the apartment into a cozy, practical, and stylish haven for Sasha. Conveniently close to the family’s own residence, the apartment offered both proximity and potential for a modern living solution.

The post A 22-Square-Meter Apartment Transformed: Compact Luxury in Moscow appeared first on Architecture Art Designs.

Kural Vista: A Luxurious Waterfront Villa by SAOTA on Palm Jumeirah, Dubai

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 09:10:29 +0000

Nestled on the G Frond of the iconic Palm Jumeirah in Dubai, Kural Vista by SAOTA and CK Architecture Interiors exemplifies refined luxury and architectural innovation. Developed by Alpago Properties, this villa harmoniously integrates modern design with the breathtaking backdrop of the Dubai skyline.

The post Kural Vista: A Luxurious Waterfront Villa by SAOTA on Palm Jumeirah, Dubai appeared first on Architecture Art Designs.

How To Clean Mold From a Toilet Base

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 08:00:11 +0000

Nobody looks forward to cleaning the toilet. However, it should be cleaned every week for the obvious reasons and to prevent mold growth. Mold spores are everywhere. They grow and thrive in wet or humid locations where there is an organic source of food. Bathrooms–especially toilets–provide everything mold requires. Especially if it is not cleaned regularly.

The Importance Of Cleaning Mold

Mold growth is not only unsightly, but it is also unhealthy. Mold releases spores that can cause allergic reactions and breathing problems. Some types of mold release mycotoxins that are toxic to humans and could produce some of the following reactions.

Sneezing.
Runny or Stuffy Nose.
Cough and Post-nasal Drip.
Itchy Eyes, Nose, and Throat.
Dry Scaly Skin.
Severe Asthma Attacks. Coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, chest tightness.

3 Ways To Clean Mold From a Toilet Base

The most likely location for mold to grow on a toilet base is in the bowl. Don’t ignore the outside–especially where it sets on the floor. Condensation, urine, and water leaks combined with dirt grow mold. If mold persists at floor level, your subfloor may be the culprit. A leak from the base of the toilet soaks the subfloor, causing mold and rot to spread. Subfloor damage usually leads to a time-consuming and sometimes expensive repair.

Bleach

Bleach removes surface mold from non-porous material like porcelain. It will not lift mold out of porous material like wood.

Mix 4 teaspoons of bleach in a quart of room-temperature water. Or follow label directions. (Some bleach is stronger than others.)
Spray the mixture liberally on moldy areas.
Let it work for about 15 minutes.
Scrub off the mold with a soft bristle brush.
Rinse and dry thoroughly.

Vinegar and Baking Soda

Vinegar and baking soda can be used in two ways. Mix up a paste and spread it on the moldy sections of the toilet base. Or sprinkle dry baking soda on moldy areas, then spray with undiluted vinegar. The paste sticks on sloped surfaces better than dry baking soda.

Mix two parts baking soda with one part vinegar into a thick paste. (8 tbsps of baking soda and 4 tbsps of vinegar cover approximately one square foot.)
Spread the paste about ¼” thick on moldy areas.
Let sit and dry for about one hour.
Scrub off the dried paste and mold.
Flush the remains inside the bowl and vacuum up the flakes outside the bowl.
Wipe with a microfiber cloth dampened with vinegar to remove any remaining paste and help deter future mold growth.

Hydrogen Peroxide

Mix hydrogen peroxide and water 50/50 in a spray bottle.
Spray the entire base–inside and outside–with the solution.
Let it work for about 15 minutes.
Scrub with a soft bristle brush or microfiber cloth.
Rinse and dry well with another microfiber cloth.

End Notes

Other than baking soda and vinegar, do not mix any of the three cleaners together. Hydrogen peroxide and vinegar create a toxic chemical reaction harmful to skin, eyes, throat, and lungs. Hydrogen peroxide mixed with bleach can cause an explosion.

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